Harr Rolled Tape-then The Tears Rolled

February 08, 1991|By Steve Hymon, Special to the Tribune.

Brock Harr touches the play button on the VCR and suddenly it`s 1988 all over again.

On the screen, there`s Harr in Lane 3, swimming for Schaumburg High School, his head completely shaved. It`s the state meet, and Harr is gunning for his third straight 200-yard individual medley title. In Lane 4, Harr points out, is Steve Leissner, his high school nemesis from Stevenson.

``He kept putting out his hand, trying to get me to shake to psych me out,`` Harr explains. ``Finally, I shoved it away and spit in his lane. My friends up in the stands were, like, `What a jerk.` ``

The race begins. Harr starts to pull away during the second 50 meters, the backstroke, and his lead during the breaststroke, his strongest stroke, is good enough for him to say, ``This is almost ridiculous.``

But here`s the scary part: Leissner is a freestyler and is gaining on Harr over the final 25 meters. Harr watches intently, laughing, when his oldself steals a glance at the charging Leissner and clamps down to touch just ahead of his foe.

His time of 1 minute 52.54 seconds is his quickest ever. It`s also the second-fastest time in the history of the state meet. And what wisdom do the SportsChannel announcers impart? ``There`s the difference between shaving

(your head) and not shaving.``

``Just listen to what they are saying,`` Harr says. ``It`s still really annoying.``

The video ends and the screen goes fuzzy, fuzzy like it was one night last October when Harr was home alone in his family`s Schaumburg apartment. That night, he sat on the floor, watching the same tape as tears rolled down his face.

The following afternoon, Harr started practicing with the Harper Community College swim team. It was the first time since he left the University of Arkansas team a year and a half before that he had considered competing.

But two weeks ago, Brock Harr`s competitive swimming career ended not with a bang, but the whisper of a Harper administrator: ``Brock, you`re not eligible.`` His grades were fine, but his hours were insufficient for a full- time student.

``He could have been a force,`` says Gordon Auckman, Harper`s swimming coach. ``Maybe it`s a blessing in disguise. He`s a good kid, a very hard worker with a natural feel for the water. It`s a shame not to see someone with that kind of talent be able to use it. But he made his bed, and now he has to sleep in it.``

There was a time when Harr use to lie in bed until the wee hours of the morning, swimming in his mind his next race time after time. For three years he was on top of his game, taking the state 200 IM title his sophomore, junior and senior years and the 100-yard breaststroke his junior and senior years.

``People would come up to me at my locker and say, `Are you going to win at state?` And I would say, `Yeah, I`m going to win,` `` he says. ``Then, it was like, `You are the cockiest S.O.B. I have ever met in my life.` And I would be like, `No, I`m confident . . . `

``I was a workaholic. I worked my butt off. I deserved everything I got at state, and I knew I did.``

When one college coach offered just a half scholarship because of Harr`s mediocre high school grades, he brushed the proposal aside. ``My ego was too big,`` he says. It would be a full ride at Arkansas, and it was at Arkansas where Harr`s problems began.

Arkansas` team, according to Harr, was heavy not with talent, but just plain heavy. Throw in the freedom of a college campus, and Harr, who weighed 170 pounds as a high school senior, finished the year close to 200. ``Drinking and eating,`` Brock says. At the same time, his grades did what his times did not: They dropped. By the end of the year, Harr was ineligible, and the scholarship was gone.

``Coming out of high school, I don`t think I understood my potential,``

Harr says now. ``When it came down to the business part, I knew I was worth a full ride athletically. Academically, I wasn`t even worth a scholarship.``

Harr returned home from Arkansas and enrolled at Harper the next fall, where his grades improved dramatically. But he was down, and everyone knew it. Later that year, he stood in front of a mirror and didn`t like what he saw. It was time to swim again. Everything that had been good in his life seemed to be connected with the water.

So he returned to Harper last fall, 20 pounds lighter. One week into practice, says Auckman, Harr was ``blowing people out of the water.`` The day after Brock found out he was ineligible to swim, he got a job as a computer operator for a business form company.

Maybe it was because he needed money, maybe it was because he couldn`t swim. Whatever, that same day he quit school. He would work full time during the day and part time at night, as an assistant swimming coach at the Twinbrook YMCA, his last connection with a watery world he once ruled.